You stand here long enough, looking out at that impossible blue stretching to forever, and you start to understand why Henry Miller said fuck it to Paris and ended up here, clinging to this ridiculous edge of America.
Paris. God, Paris. Where art and sex and love all tangled together in dim-lit cafés and unmade beds, where everyone was either a genius or pretending to be one, where you could live on wine and argument and the occasional piece of bread. Miller knew that hunger. That beautiful, terrible hunger for everything: for flesh, for truth, for the kind of art that comes from your gut, not some bullshit academic theory.
But even Paris gets exhausting. Even beauty becomes a pose. And so Miller came here, to this wind-scraped cliff where the mountains dive into the Pacific like they’re trying to escape something, or find something. Maybe both.
Big Sur doesn’t give a shit about your credentials. It doesn’t care if you’ve read the right books or fucked the right people or said the clever thing at the right party. It just is: vast, indifferent, magnificent. And somehow that indifference is more honest than anything you’ll find in the salons and bistros of the sixth arrondissement.
Miller understood that the best art, the best love, the best sex all come from the same place. That raw, hungry, undeniable place that civilization tries to polish out of us. Here, on this cliff, with the wind trying to knock you on your ass and the ocean roaring its ancient, meaningless song, you remember what Miller knew: that we’re all just animals trying to make something beautiful before we die.
Paris taught me refinement. Big Sur teaches you surrender. Both are necessary. Both are true. Miller knew he needed both, even if it took him half a lifetime to figure it out.
Big Sur is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked at from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look. Henry Miller
[Duration is] the form which the succession of our conscious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains from separating its present state from its former state. Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will
Ten hours. Ten plus hours. And for what? To watch someone refuse separation, refuse the neat severing of this moment from the last one, this breath from the previous exhalation. That’s the whole savage beauty of it, isn’t it? The willful rejection of our mandatory amnesia, our cultural agreement to keep moving, keep consuming, keep forgetting.
Just the brutal, gorgeous insistence on staying, on making you confront the fact that time isn’t this clean digital readout but this messy, accumulating thing that changes you while you’re standing there trying not to notice.
Stanford. The Cummings Art Building. An academic temple where people theorize about disruption while sitting in ergonomic chairs. And here comes Raegan, planting herself there for half a goddamn day, turning her body into a living refutation of efficiency, of productivity, of all the silicon valley horseshit happening just outside those walls. Exchange, she called it. What are we exchanging? Discomfort for awareness? Boredom for presence? The tyranny of the schedule for something approaching actual human time?
Bergson got it, when you stop cleaving yourself into marketable increments, when you let one state bleed into the next without the surgery of distraction, something happens. The ego lives. Not performs, not produces… lives. And that’s terrifying to a culture built on the premise that every moment should justify its existence, should pay rent, should add value.
This is art as refusal. Ten hours of saying no to the phone, no to the next thing, no to the idea that meaning arrives in bite sized chunks. It’s physically demanding in the most unspectacular way, not the melodrama of pain or endurance stunts, but the grinding ache of just being when being isn’t supposed to be enough anymore.
You had to be there, marinating in it, feeling your own impatience become data, your resistance become the real performance.
Raw, necessary, probably insufferable to half the people who wandered in. Perfect.
Underground venues are a photographer’s nightmare. The light’s always wrong, some amber wash from a single gel, maybe a practical lamp someone dragged in from their living room, and darkness everywhere else. Viracocha is no exception. I’m fumbling with ISO settings, knowing most shots are gonna have grain like sandpaper, trying to find an angle that doesn’t blow out her face or lose her completely to the shadows.
Meklit was shares a place with Nat over on Franconia Street. One of those Bernal Heights houses where the rent was just barely manageable and the walls were thin enough to hear someone working through a melody or a relationship at 2:22 AM. Which means I knew her. Which means I couldn’t photograph her worth a damn.
She’d come to plenty of the Franconia Performance Salons, she’d performed at a couple of them. Those cramped living room shows where everyone sat on the floor and you could hear every breath between notes. Where the distinction between audience and performer dissolved and everyone ended up in the kitchen talking until 3 AM. So by the time I’m trying to shoot her at Viracocha, she’s not some artist I’m documenting, she’s someone I’ve watched work through new material in a room that smelled like Michael’s curry was still warm on the stove.
You’re supposed to have distance. That’s what makes the work honest, you see what’s there, not what you want to be there. But when you’re shooting someone you’ve shared beers with, whose voice you’ve heard through walls at odd hours, someone who’s stood in your friend’s living room and made thirty people forget to breathe… you lose that. You can’t see them objectively. You see the person, not the performer. Or worse, you see both, and you freeze up trying to figure out which one you’re supposed to be capturing.
You’re supposed to stay detached when you’re shooting. Find the frame, wait for the moment, click. But she’s hitting these notes that come up from somewhere deep, singing in Amharic and English like they’re the same language, and suddenly you’re not a photographer anymore, you’re just someone who knows this person, watching them do something extraordinary, feeling proud and useless in equal measure.
The technical problems don’t stop. The stage is barely a stage, more like a designated corner with a mic stand. I’m shooting from too close because there’s nowhere else to stand, trying not to be that asshole photographer blocking everyone’s view. The dynamic range is impossible: her face catches a slash of light, everything else goes black. You either expose for her or you expose for the room. There is no both.
This is what matters: the photos lie. They flatten it. They turn a moment that grabbed you by the throat into a two-dimensional document of inadequate lighting, bad acoustics, and a photographer who couldn’t stay objective. But you shoot anyway, because maybe, just maybe, someone looking at that grainy, underlit image years later will see something. A woman singing in a small San Francisco venue on a Wednesday in December. You had to have been there to know what actually happened. The photos just prove it existed.
I didn’t want any new clothes at all; because if I had to look ugly anyway, I wanted to at least be comfortable. I let the awful clothes affect even my posture, walked around with my back bowed, my shoulders drooping, my hands and arms all over the place. I was afraid of mirrors, because they showed an inescapable ugliness. Franz Kafka, Diaries of Franz Kafka
The Sonoma Mission squats there like the last gasp of something that already knew it was dying when they built it in 1823. The final outpost, the twenty-first link in a chain of spectacular ambition and casual brutality stretched up the California coast. You can feel it, this desperate, magnificent hubris frozen in adobe.
Stand in the courtyard and you’re standing in the wreckage of empires. The Spanish padres with their visions of salvation, the Native Californians whose world got dismantled brick by blessed brick, the whole fever dream of manifest destiny before anyone even called it that. It lasted what, barely a decade before secularization gutted it?
The walls absorbed everything, prayers, screams, the mundane tedium of forced conversion, the sweat of people building their own cage. Now it’s whitewashed and placid, tour groups shuffling through, but there’s this residual voltage humming underneath. History as a low-frequency drone you feel in your bones.
Every mission’s a monument to complicated truth, but this one? Being last means something. They knew the party was over before they finished the foundation. There’s poetry in that, building cathedrals while the empire crumbles, leaving ghosts that won’t quite dissolve in the California sun.
What gets me is how performance becomes the only honest medium for dealing with governmental dishonesty. You’re creating something live, ephemeral, something that by its very nature can’t be perfectly preserved or controlled, the exact opposite of Nixon’s paranoid recording compulsion. There’s something genuinely radical about taking the most documented presidency in history up to that point and making art about what wasn’t documented, what got “accidentally” destroyed.
And Nixon’s quote, “I don’t give a shit what happens”, that’s the aesthetic principle of every failed empire right there. The desperate flailing of control freaks losing control. Performance art that deals with this material isn’t just commentary; it’s inoculation. You’re forcing people to sit with the discomfort of knowing that power operates in these gaps, these erasures, these convenient malfunctions.
The beauty is in the duration: 18 ½ minutes. That’s long enough to be genuinely uncomfortable, to make an audience feel the weight of absence. Not the safe distance of documentary, but something more visceral and present. You’re asking people to experience the gap rather than analyze it from a comfortable remove. That’s where the real work happens, in the squirming, the wondering, the inability to look away from nothing.
I don’t give a shit what happens. I want you all to stonewall—plead the Fifth Amendment, cover-up, or anything else. If that will save it, save the plan. President Richard Nixon to his subordinates in the White House during Watergate
What I captured here isn’t about art, not really, it’s about that vanishing fucking species called intimacy in the age of calculated spectacle. I was there. I saw it happen.
Ryan Tacata’s hammer piece… the repetition, the physical commitment, the way duration becomes its own argument against everything quick and consumable. That’s the kind of work that doesn’t translate, that refuses to be content. Your camera caught the sweat and the ritual, but what you felt was that rare thing where someone commits their body to an idea until the idea becomes flesh. Mesmerizing because it demands you stay present, because it won’t give you an exit.
But Meklit, yeah, she stole it. Because when someone that good strips it down to voice and bass in a living room, you’re not watching a performance anymore. You’re in something. The walls close in, not claustrophobic but conspiratorial. No arena reverb to hide behind, no lighting cues to tell you when to feel. Just her and the wood of that bass and however many people crammed in there breathing the same air. That’s not a concert, that’s a séance.
My photographs catch people mid-transformation, Yula Paluy suspended in whatever private negotiation she’s having with gravity and self. Tiffany Trenda projecting outward while the room pulls inward. What’s gorgeous and sad is knowing these salons are a kind of endangered ecosystem, people still willing to show up, sit down, shut up, and be there for something that won’t trend, won’t scale, won’t even necessarily make sense by morning.
I documented the resistance. The refusal to be elsewhere. That’s the real performance.
Vénérons le chien. Le chien (quel drôle de bête!), a sa sueur sur sa langue et son sourire dans sa queue. Victor Hugo, L’Homme qui rit
Victor Hugo nailed it over a century ago: the dog has its sweat on its tongue and its smile in its tail.
And here’s Sharka, this gorgeous Portuguese Water Dog, proving Hugo’s point on some windswept beach. You can practically see that smile in her tail, can’t you? That unbridled, unselfconscious joy that we humans spend our entire lives chasing through bottles, accomplishments, and fleeting moments of recognition.
Meanwhile, this dog? She’s already there. She’s been there. She doesn’t need to find meaning.
Sharka is meaning.
This dog on this beach understands something I’m still struggling to learn: that the sacred and the simple are the same fucking thing.
Vénérons le chien, indeed. Let us venerate the dog. Not because they’re cute or loyal or any of that Hallmark card bullshit, but because they’ve figured out what we’ve forgotten, how to be fully, completely, stupidly alive in the moment. No regrets, no anxiety about tomorrow, just salt air and sand and the pure animal pleasure of being.
Wanderlust on the road outside the town of Pescadero
I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling. Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums
These aren’t just photographs of bodies doing things in rooms, they’re evidence of something that mattered, at least for one night, in a living room that was never the same afterward.
Angrette’s Vessel. Christ, the Vessel. This magnificent structure she rebuilt, not built, rebuilt, meaning it had a life before, died somewhere else, and got resurrected in this domestic space. Living rooms aren’t supposed to contain vessels. They’re supposed to contain couches and disappointment and the faint smell of whoever used to live there before. But Angrette made it hold something else, made it become something else, turned that room into a cathedral for one night.
We had this whole other performance mapped out, Angrette and I. This pilgrimage with the Vessel, dragging it to the ocean where the light does that thing at dusk, hauling it into the redwoods where the scale of everything gets cosmically rearranged, planting it downtown where the indifference of the city could either destroy it or make it mean something it never meant before. The Vessel at Big Sur. The Vessel in Muir Woods with those cathedral trees making it look suddenly small, suddenly human scaled in a way that’s almost unbearable. The Vessel on Market Street with people walking past it like it’s not even there.
But it didn’t happen. Of course it didn’t happen. Because these conversations, these late night planning sessions where everything seems possible and the logistics haven’t murdered the dream yet, they’re their own art form. The phantom projects. The ones that exist perfectly in that space between intention and execution, where they never have to confront reality’s tedious insistence on things like transportation and permits and the fact that Angrette probably had a life.
And then there’s Niki, working with microorganisms. Microorganisms. I’m standing there with a camera, this machine designed to capture light and form and gesture, and she’s conjuring something that exists at a scale the human eye can’t even properly register without technological assistance. Performance art about the invisible, the microbial, the stuff that’s crawling all over us and inside us and making us possible but we can’t see it.
How do I photograph that? How do I document a performance about something my camera can’t even resolve? I’m capturing Niki’s body, her movements, whatever physical vocabulary she’s using to invoke these tiny lives. But the actual subject, the microorganisms themselves, they’re absent from the frame. They have to be. So I’m documenting a translation of a translation, a performance about something rather than a documentation of something. All metaphor and approximation. All faith that something real is being conjured even though nobody can prove it.
Michael Hunter working through Cage, because someone’s always doing Cage at these things, and sometimes it even matters. The careful language of “new work” and “installations” and “environments” that tries to avoid saying what’s actually going on, which is people standing in rooms making shapes with their bodies and believing it means something.
And maybe, maybe, these salons, these careful gatherings where everyone knows everyone, maybe they’re not about making something that lasts. Maybe they’re about creating a space where failure isn’t just accepted but elevated, sanctified, turned into its own kind of sacrament.
The Gertrude Stein quote sitting at the bottom of this post like a land mine: “A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an end in itself.” Which is either the most honest thing anyone’s ever said about performance art or the most elaborate excuse ever constructed. But now I think it’s about something else entirely. Not failure as surrender, but failure as its own kind of completeness. The Vessel that stayed in one place and somehow went everywhere. The microorganisms that couldn’t be photographed but somehow were. The moments that died the instant they were performed but keep breathing in these frozen fragments.
I chose black and white because I understand something about the quality of attention in that room. The grain, the contrast, the way bodies emerge from and dissolve back into shadow, I was translating the actual temperature of the moment. These images are haunted by what’s not in them: the Vessel’s ghost road trip through California, the microorganisms doing their invisible dance, all the conversations and intentions that never quite became the things we planned.
